Riverside Community Care

Mrs. Stephanie Abate, and Mr.

Solomon Balban have been making deductions from my food benefits through the Department of transitional Assistance without providing me with any documentation of the amounts and purchases that are involved despite numerous attempts for this to be obtained from the Dedham office. This month I was left with $30.00 to last me 17 days until the next benefit issue date. Todd Mitchell threatened to amputate my leg, arm, and finger, Anne Howlette threatened to kick me in the face, and Scott Remlin is a bully. This is how these men and women at Riverside treat people that are in their group homes that are unable to defend themselves because medications affect the ability to defend oneself.

I am seriously considering going to a homeless shelter and starting over.

Having to endure constant threats is not conducive to recovery, and the administration is dismissive, being a problem in public reputation. I would appreciate it if someone were to help to get me the *** out of here, or I will do so on my own.

It their counseling staff is on the same level as their CSP program for housing services, I'll be homeless AND insane in less than a month. Took a month to get connected to this program and was assigned a 3 day a week intern who has no idea of the process or resources...since I told them I needed stable housing before I could start counseling, and nobody has called to even see how I'm holding up against the depression and anxiety off all the stress...

I am so disgusted with these ppl and. Their cbfs services.

It is not what they advertise it to be. Everyone gets treated different. Based on whether. They think you deserve this or that service.

The truth comes out later after they have gotten their claws into you and there is no escape..I feel like Im stuck at Danvers in the early.

20th Century..Noone listens because the have alteady formed their own opinion and of course..they are ALWAYS. right.

I love the people at Riverside in Wakefield and Lynnfield. My daughter has had mental issues scene she has been 19 yrs.old.

She has been in just about every hospital in this area including Maclean's. Who by the way says she can not go back, because she keeps trying to kill herself. She was sent to the state Hosp. Riverside worked so them to get into a community home.

She is doing so well. They save not only her but the people who are affected at home to deal with the craziness. I would send any one to the .

They work very hard and are very caring people!!! Thank you Trudy,Marjorie, Ryan,Brandy,Paula,and the staff at Gould St.

The therapist they assigned me was inexperienced, and had no concept of boundaries. She was very deceptive and decided to disregard the treatment plan we agreed upon, refused to work with me towards my treatment goals regarding my PTSD, deciding instead to make her own goals and treatment plan to work by without even informing me, instead of the one we agreed upon. When I tried to discuss therapy with her, it was impossible to get her to discuss a new treatment plan. I first assumed it was just inexperience and dealing with a lot of patients that she often forgot important details of previous conversations and also did not take any notes, but someone discarded the notes when she did, and I did not find this out until weeks of repeatedly asking her to bring the notes to the meeting. Then she made it more and more clear that she was not just forgetting things, she had no intention to actually work with me. She became more and more uncooperative and deliberated in her refusal to work with me towards my treatment goals (in fact, deliberately working towards the opposite of my goals in some act of spite) until finally she was increasingly verbally abusive every week, and, increasingly, delusional and impossible to actually communicate with, since she was increasingly unwilling to listen, and just randomly made assumptions and ran with them. It was around this time (after two years of seeing her) that she became completely intolerable instead of simply being some routine useless background noise in my life that I could kind of deal with. I tried to stop seeing her, only to see, over and over again, that getting a new therapist and/or formally complaining about an abusive therapist was extremely difficult at Riverside.

She completely crossed the line when she decided it would be appropriate to sexually harass me in her office. She wore very tight/skimpy clothing to work anyways, but then used sexually suggestive body language. When I disregarded her sexually provocative behavior (telling myself that she must be oblivious to it due to being naive and perhaps just copying the body movements of overly sexualized women in the media), she escalated it. I was extremely uncomfortable with the increasingly apparent possibility that she was trying to sexualize her emotionally abusive relationship with me which I had been trying to escape (but did not have easy enough means to do so as quickly as I'd have liked, so she was just a nuisance I had to tolerate until I could get her out of my life). I often found myself trying to rationalize the idea because the idea was so appalling to me that the only way for me to cope was denial. When I looked away from her inappropriate sexualised body movements to try to tell myself she wasn't seriously trying to sexualize her interactions with me, she'd stomp her foot on the floor to disrupt my rationalization process and dissociation, since she knew I have dissociative tendencies and apparently really wanted me to take notice of her behavior. She eventually verbalized this delusion she had been entertaining: she had been telling herself while she was making sexually inappropriate movements and watching me look away that I had a crush on her. While being oblivious to the reality that I absolutely despised her. When she told me this, I was very angry. As usual, I remained polite, and did not express much emotion to her, since I had given up on trying to communicate with her long ago at that point, and was just waiting for the time that my request for a new therapist would finally work and I'd see a new therapist, who perhaps I could talk to about the old one.

She was a complete sociopath and also a *** who was increasingly obsessed with the stuff between my legs, and that was her eventually stated reason for refusing to work with me. She liked to try to steer the conversation in that direction and eventually brought it up at random. I was afraid she'd be one of those *** 'people' with no soul whatsoever who are absolutely obsessed with breeding to the point of caring about absolutely nothing else. Unfortunately, I had to keep seeing her long enough for her to tell me TMI about the fact she was. She had firstly refused to talk to me about nonsexual things I wanted to talk to a therapist about in the first place, and then she brought up sex at random. She got some sort of sick, emotionally sadistic thrill out of any signs of distress I'd show, and smiled a smug and satisfied sort of smile whenever she saw she was making me upset or angry with her verbal abuse and sexual harassment. But then again, maybe she was still too busy telling herself that the regularly repressed rage (sometimes followed by literally days of being angry/upset at anything particularly awful I had to tolerate from her) was sexual feelings.

Changing therapists is ridiculously hard at Riverside. I remember that I tried, repeatedly, to change therapists, but they demanded I explain myself, and I was in so much shock from having them ask 'why?' that I could not find the words to describe 'why', and eventually the list of greivances was piling up so high that it was impossible for me to even explain in a timely manner 'why' I wanted to change therapists. Just the fact that therapist made me uncomfortable on a regular basis should have been enough. All that time, I thought they could eventually assign me a new therapist, but they repeatedly wouldn't, and I was always left speechless at their refusal to do so and insistance that I discuss any problems with my therapist (who, unfortunately, kind of WAS the problem at that point). What my therapist subjected me to each week was so stressful that in order to function at all I had to just try to forget about the meetings and that I had to see her for some days between times I had to see her. Unfortunately, the amount of time out of each week I'd spend either being upset about the last meeting or dreading the next one gradually increased to a point where it consumed all of my time, but I didn't have to see her for much longer after that.

Finally, after some months of weekly verbal abuse and sexual harassment, that therapist was pregnant and preparing for maternity leave, so I took that as my chance at getting a new therapist. I explained that not only was I not comfortable discussing my problems with that particular therapist, but due to the nature of my particular issues, a pregnant mom-to-be would not be someone appropriate to try to talk to about it with. They STILL wanted me to keep seeing her, and thought they could get me to keep seeing her until she went on maternity leave. They seemed to have either forgotten all the times I had wanted to stop seeing her before, or to think it was some sort of joke, or were actually alright with regularly disregarding someone's persistant desire to stop seeing a particular therapist and see a different therapist, and with escalating their disregard to a certain extreme that really seems a bit passive agressive in hindsight, but is more easily explained by apathy.

My reward for finally putting my foot down and absolutely refusing to keep seeing her and escalating things to the point where I brought a relative in with me to help get them to cooperate with me on changing therapists, was that they assigned me a therapist who had the same first name as me and who was the same age as me, after the old one had obsessively referred to me in third person for some months. Then they absolutely would not just give me a new therapist. I say good riddance to them, but three years of my time was wasted trying to get therapy out of them, and I will never get that time back or the 6 months (so far) that I've spent undoing the damage they did. I really did not need this ***. I was crazy to begin with. PTSD and major depression are a horrible way to go insane, and I was really trying to get better when the sociopathic *** therapist made me worse and the clinic acted almost as if I had wronged her somehow.

If you seriously want to get better, do not go to Riverside Community Care. They wont even meet you halfway on that. They are a bunch of goofballs, and they're apparently content with that. I wish I had some sort of recourse, but I can't ever get back the time I wasted trying to work with them anyways, or the time it takes to undo the damage they did, and I can't prove the damages to a court of law anyways, since the damage is wasted time and absurd amounts of emotional distress.

My primary care doc sent me here when my regular shrink stopped accepting my insurance. Riverside promised I would not "fall through the cracks" and since then, they've failed to provide me with a therapist and "forgotten" to refill several prescriptions they started me on.

So frustrated now that I'm not able to call and find someplace better. I guess I'll just stop my meds and give up on therapy. Thanks, Riverside. When I'm dead, I hope you pay some of the funeral expenses, because it will be completely your fault.

I only hope others see this and seek help elsewhere. It's too late for me.

I could not wait to fire this company. The mentor assigned to my child was a disaster, with no real experience. The clinician was totally inexperienced, and in over -her-head. I felt like they were regurgitating their course texts, which was really annoying and not helpful. The worst was their patronizing attitude, making us feel like poor parents, despite our child's illness.

Communication was poor, and the mentor didn't have a clue about boundaries, taking it upon herself to attend my child's out-pt therapy sessions without permission. Trust was sorely lacking due to the fact that they were deceptive in order to make themselves look favorable to an outside agency, which created unnecessary repercussions for our family that we were left to deal with. Their excuse was a miscommunication.

I believe that the clinician had her heart in the right place, but lacked experience, and was push-around by her subordinate mentor. I had to ask this person to leave on several occasions because she upset my child leaving me to deal with the consequences. She was clueless, and just plain ignorant. In my opinion, she really should not be working in mental health.

Thank you Riverside, for creating and intensifying the very issues you were brought in to ease. We are fortunate to have the documentation supporting this conclusion, and will decide shortly what our next steps are.

I wasn't particularly impressed with Riverside Community Care in Upton, Mass., where I went for help with a mood/anxiety disorder, because I found the clinicians to be aloof, dispassionate and uncaring. It wasn't until I went elsewhere and saw how other places operate that I realized how bad it is.

Riverside has doctors that do nothing but prescribe medicine and "licensed therapists" (not doctors) who do nothing but chat with you. No therapy, guidelines, strategies, discussions of how the brain works, nothing. Just useless, pointless rap sessions with a seemingly uneducated social worker and an MD with a prescription pad who makes zero effort to understand the problem. All they seem to care about is when you're coming back to pay for another session.

There are good mental health options with caring people who help you set goals and reach them. This not one of them.

Their counselors don't seem to know what they are doing or maybe they just don't care. I was so disappointed because I had done a lot of research about them online and had heard such positive things.

Their website made it seem like the perfect place for me. I thought it was just me until I met other people who had gone there and had experienced pretty much what I had. They felt like the counselors just didn't really know what they were doing. Maybe if you are having a temporary, minor problem, it might be an okay place to go.

But if you have been diagnosised with depression and PTSD, like I have, they certainly don't have the expertise to help you. I would recommend finding a good one-one-one therapist.

Riverside Community Care in Upton, Massachusetts, is a short-term mental health facility that ostensibly treats patients for depression, anxiety and other mental health issues. In fact, the doctor that "treated" me - Andreas Laddis - is an insensitive, uncaring, nasty bully who made me feel as if I was wasting his time, accused me of lying, denied my requests to talk to other professionals and called me names.

If you've ever seen the Geico commercial with R.

Lee Ermey as the therapist, you've got maybe half an idea of what this guy is like. If you or someone you care about has mental health problems, this is the absolute last place you'd ever want to go.